Teaching

Teaching responsibilities in the ENDLab reflect many of our research interests, and include core and elective subjects on mechanics, dynamics, nonlinear dynamics and experimental methods. All the students get experience of being TA's during their time in the ENDLab. The courses. The courses we are involved in are listed below.

2.003J Dynamics and Control I

Introduction to the dynamics and vibrations of lumped-parameter models of mechanical systems. Kinematics. Force-momentum formulation for systems of particles and rigid bodies in planar motion. Work-energy concepts. Virtual displacements and virtual work. Lagrange's equations for systems of particles and rigid bodies in planar motion. Linearization of equations of motion. Linear stability analysis of mechanical systems. Free and forced vibration of linear multi-degree of freedom models of mechanical systems; matrix eigenvalue problems. Introduction to numerical methods and MATLAB to solve dynamics and vibrations problems.

Course material for 2.003J, including Prof. Peacock's lecture notes, are available through the MIT OpenCourseWare. [link]

There are also very nice video lectures presented by Prof. Sarma, which present the material in a slightly different way. [link]

Detailed course notes and psets from the material originally developed by Professor Rothman are available. [link] There is a set of Applets put together by Prof. Michael Cross at Caltech to give you some experience playing around with chaotic dynamics. [link]

Lagrangian Coherent Structures

We have developed a short course (5 lectures) on the topic of Lagrangian Coherent Structures and their application to ocean transport problems. The course covers flow maps, flow map gradients, the right Cauchy-Green strain tensor and its eigenvectors and eigenvalues, Finite-Time Lyapunov Exponents (FTLE), strainlines and shearlines, numerical methods. The course notes and Matlab software are available on request.

There is an extensive set of notes developed for this course by Prof. Peacock that builds on an early set of notes by Prof. Brenner (Harvard), and which have been added to by others in more recent years. If you would like a copy of these notes, just email Prof. Peacock with your request (they can't be posted online for copyright reasons right now. sorry).